


the drum beats out of time

by lethean



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst with a Happy Ending, Ghost Shiro, Ghosts, M/M, Mystery, SHEITH - Freeform, Slow Burn, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-03
Updated: 2019-02-20
Packaged: 2019-10-21 16:30:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17646290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lethean/pseuds/lethean
Summary: Keith has spent the past ten years forgetting what happened that summer, but when he goes back to the old family house for a month and meets Shiro, the ghost that's haunting the place, he quickly realizes there is more to his past than he knows.And it is quickly catching up to him, whether he remembers it or not.





	1. Chapter 1

_He didn’t sleep in the room, after, though he returned every night compulsively. It whispered in the back of his mind, and he’d open his eyes and find himself standing there, in front of the door, hand stretched out._

_He stood there now, handle cold in his palm, door opening wider and wider and only shadow beyond. He stumbled forward towards the darkness, ‘come here’ it whispered, crooned, sang. ‘Come here.’_

_The shadows moved and the door shut behind him—_

_The car door shut behind him. It loomed at the edge of his vision, still, but he didn’t turn, didn’t look, knew it watched and would keep watching even when he was a thousand miles away._

_The other boy knocked on the window, and he rolled it down. Neither of them said anything, neither of them looked at each other. Goodbye, he wanted to say, or maybe that he was sorry. He didn’t know why he was sorry. He wasn’t. He was. There was nothing else._

_The car moved down the drive and away. The boy looked after him, or maybe he looked back at the boy. There was no one there except_ it.

_It stared after him; watched, always watched, from the very beginning, he just hadn’t seen. He wouldn’t forget._

_He just couldn’t remember—what had it been? The room—the shadows—the darkness that swallowed him and the voice that whispered—_

_What?_

\---

The sun beat down on the car, harsh rays streaming through the windows and highlighting each smudge of dirt that littered the surface. The air conditioning had given out around an hour into the journey, and hot air flowed through the open windows. Sweat trickled down the back of Keith’s neck, plastered his hair to his forehead, and the steering wheel burned under his hands, but all he could think about were dark forests and jagged peaks, surrounding them on all sides like someone had taped postcards to the windows and the month of vacation he’d paid for with promises he’d regret making. But he was free, almost, for the first time in so long he could barely recognize the feeling; no obligations, no exams, no rapidly approaching due dates. Just him and his friends and a whole house all to themselves.

The others were mostly asleep, exhausted by the early morning start. Hunk snored in the backseat, with Lance propped up on his arm, drooling. Pidge sat up front, video game console clutched loosely in her hands, eyes drooping.

Keith smiled, swallowed the laugh that bubbled in his chest, and turned left, following the directions he’d memorized the week before. They were high up in the mountains, and the rest of the way to Arus was uphill. The scenery whipped past, and the wind that blew in through the windows carried the scent of trees and greenery with it. The car jumped each time it hit a bump in the road, and Pidge jolted awake. Keith could see the console slipping out of her fingers and into her lap from the corner of his eye.

“Are we there yet?” she grumbled, rubbing at her face and blinking against the bright sun.

“Almost,” Keith told her. It felt almost like he was flying; no road beneath the tires, just the endless sky, and freedom thrummed through his veins.

Pidge narrowed her eyes and raised her eyebrows as she stared out at the road in front of them, glasses hanging on by the tip of her nose. Keith couldn’t help the snort that escaped him, and she swatted him indignantly.

“Arus is close, I promise. Just a bit more.”

“There are no signs of civilization anywhere,” Pidge pointed out.

She wasn’t wrong. Arus was a small, picture-perfect town situated at the heart of the Balmera Mountains, as far away from anything else as it was possible to come. It survived almost entirely on tourism, and was filled with more hotels, hostels, and rental properties than normal houses, and more hiking trails than any town could possibly want. Lance had given them all the same lecture once he’d found out where they were going, and had managed to find out everything about the place that was available on the internet, which wasn’t much.

But they hadn’t come up there to spend weeks in tents in the forest, and their vacation was just a bonus. The paperwork had just gone through after almost a year of uncertainty, and Keith’s mom had finally taken over the old family property that lay just outside of Arus. He could vaguely remember lazy days spent chasing around the old dusty hallways and playing games outside under the shadow of the trees. He hadn’t been back there since he was a child, and nostalgia had overcome him when Krolia showed him the pictures.

He’d happily agreed to help tidying the place so that Krolia could make use of it, and his friends had volunteered, too, eager to escape the city.

Now that they were closer, though, Keith was starting to regret it. Some places should stay firmly as memories and not be tainted by new impressions. He’d felt weird ever since that morning, too, and couldn’t figure out the reason.

But with a final turn, the car rolled into Arus, and it was too late to back out. Old wood and stone houses with steep roofs lined the empty street, charming despite, or maybe because of, the worn paint and crumbling mortar and the scent of pine trees thick in the air. It didn’t look real, like they were on a movie set and Keith could reach out and topple the cardboard facades. They could have stepped back in time a hundred years, and Keith wouldn’t have been surprised.

Except the beat-up red truck parked in front of a store with a neon sign didn’t quite fit in with that picture, and neither did the middle-aged guy sitting outside in a plastic chair drinking beer.

Keith didn’t want to linger for long in town, and made up his mind to continue driving straight without stopping before they reached the house. There was just one problem. He couldn’t remember the way.

“Lance,” he called to the backseat. “Wake up.”

Lance groaned and rubbed his face against Hunk’s arm. Hunk was awake, barely, and blinked blearily against the bright daylight.

“Lance.”

“Nooo,” Lance moaned. “The eggs! The eggs—don’t let them out …”

Keith picked up one of Pidge’s chocolate bars and tossed it at him. Lance’s eyes popped open and immediately turned to Keith, accusing.

“There’s a map in one of the bags back there,” Keith said.

“Why me? And which bag?” A sly smile spread on his face. “Have you gotten lost on the way to your own house?”

Keith rolled his eyes. “It’s not my house, Lance.”

Lance ignored Keith’s comment, as well as his request.

“Why look at a map when we can just ask?” he said, motioning towards the man in the plastic chair, and looked at Keith expectantly.

“You’re the people-person,” Pidge said, already starting up her game.

“Fine, fine!” Lance said, hands rising in surrender. “The things I do for you people.”

Keith rolled closer to the store, and Lance leaned out the window.

“Hello! Nice weather we’re having!”

The man, who had a grizzled beard that completely covered his mouth, grunted in reply, plastic chair scraping across the ground as he sat up a little. Lance showed no signs of discouragement.

“We’ll be staying in the area for a while. You have a beautiful town!”

The man grunted again, but the irritated expression wasn’t as obvious.

“Say, you wouldn’t be able to give us some directions, would you? We’re not sure where to go from here.”

“Sure,” the man said, voice deep and rugged to match his appearance. “Which place?”

“It’s supposed to be a bit outside town,” Lance said, rummaging around for some papers he’d no doubt printed out before they left. “Galra House.”

When Lance held out the papers for the man to look at, he waved him off.

“Don’t need that,” he said gruffly. “I know the place, alright. Outside town a few miles, just keep following this road. Take the first left and the second right and you’ll be there. Can’t miss it.”

“First left … and … second … right,” Lance muttered as he wrote it down. “Thanks!”

The man grunted once more. “You kids be careful. ‘S a lotta stuff out there that’s dangerous.”

“We will be!” Lance said, chipper as always.

“We should probably get some groceries, too, don’t you think?” Hunk said.

“If you’re looking for groceries, there’s a store just down the road,” the man said.

Lance thanked him once more, and Keith started the car again. It was easy to find, with a faded sign hanging outside that just said GENERAL STORE and wares stacked high in the windows. It flashed in Keith’s mind the moment he saw it, an image of the same store, identical, except newer, somehow. A memory, but Keith couldn’t remember much of Arus at all, and nothing else he looked at sparked more.

“We’ll split the cost,” Hunk suggested, already gearing up as they exited the car.

“Sure,” Keith said, happily signing over control to Hunk, who would at least make sure they had some real food.

When Keith entered the store, he was met with a wall of cool air and sighed in relief. As Hunk walked around the aisles with strict purpose, keeping sharp eye on Lance the entire time, Keith wandered around slowly. He had nothing he particularly wanted to buy, but that flash of memory he had outside niggled in the back of his mind. He didn’t experience it again, inside. The aisles were unfamiliar; old shelves filled half with brands Keith had never heard of, and pale brown-tiled floors, cracked in some places, gray dirt permanent in the corners where cleaning supplies couldn’t reach.

The sweat dried into patches of ice on Keith’s skin and he shivered, moving back to the entrance. Keith watched a spider spinning a web connecting an old cart and the tire of their car.

It didn’t take long for Hunk to make his way over, though when Keith glanced at the contents he saw more chocolate and other snacks than Hunk would have picked out himself.

The lady at the checkout greeted them cheerily.  

“I don’t think I’ve seen you around before! Tourists?”

“Yeah!” Lance said. “Well, mostly. We’re here to relax and do some work.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know any nice trails?” Hunk asked.

“Hm,” she said and thought for a bit. “There’s lots of nice ones. Pick any direction and you’re likely to find something. But there’s one that starts just outside town. Goes up for part of the mountain, through a really nice wooded area. It has a lovely view a bit higher up.”

“We’ll check it out!” Lance said, brimming with excitement, and all Keith could think about was how many selfies with scenic backgrounds would pop up on his instagram feed.

“Do you kids have a map?” the lady asked. “Wouldn’t want to get lost up on the mountain.”

“We have a big one.”

“You should get a small, local one. The paths are all marked out. Let’s see.” She bent under the counter and pulled out a folded, plastic-wrapped map. “Here you go. All the popular trails are color-coded. You need any more help, there’s an information center just down the road.”

She smiled widely at them, lips pulling back to show her gums.

“Thank you! You’ve been a great help!”

“You staying in one of the hotels? Or renting?” she asked as she scanned the last of the items and started bagging them.

“Oh, no, we’re staying in a place just outside town. We’re gonna help clear it out, and get to stay there for free.”

“Oh? Which house?”

“Galra House, I think the name is, right, Keith? Do you know the place?”

The lady smiled at them still, but it took her a second to answer. It might have been Keith’s imagination, but her expression looked like it was plastered on.

“Oh, I know the place.” Her smile stiffened further. “Be careful up there. It’s an old house, and I don’t know if it’s been much taken care of recently.”

The lady’s reaction played over and over again in Keith’s mind as they loaded the groceries in the car. The house _had_ been empty, for at least a year, and almost ten years before that. Leaky roofs and rotten beams were par for the course. But there was something in the lady’s face that Keith couldn’t identify, like she knew a secret he didn’t.

The spider had finished its web and disappeared somewhere. Even so, he felt a twinge of regret when he started the car down the road and the web ripped to pieces.

The warm scent in the air (blooming flowers and pine and cut grass and dust whipped up by the car) refreshed him, lifted the fog his exams had left behind, and soon enough all thoughts of strange remarks and expressions faded. It was impossible to think with Lance singing loudly along to the top 40 hit he was currently obsessed with, anyway.

Galra House lay further from Arus than Keith remembered, further than he had expected. The road twisted and turned and made the car jump, and he almost missed the second right. Some large shrubs obscured the turn, and though there was a sign that said GALRA HOUSE 1.4 MILES, it was so rotten and swallowed by plants he only saw it as he drove past, two feet away.

“Foreboding,” Pidge said, eyebrows raised.

“Is—are we sure this is the right way?” Hunk asked in a half-whisper.

“There’s a sign,” Lance said. “Come on, I’m starving!”

Keith turned down onto the narrow road and continued, slowing down to a crawl. The overgrown bushes on each side of the road towered above the car, branches stretched so far they brushed against it.

“Doesn’t seem like anyone’s taken care of this place lately,” Pidge muttered, hands gripping her game console tightly.

“Krolia told us there was a lot to do,” Hunk said. “I just hope the house isn’t as bad as this road.”

“Is that it?” Lance asked, turning his music off. “Over there?”

He pointed out the right window, and Keith glanced in the direction. Just above the tops of some trees a roof and half a dozen chimneys poken up, and a minute later when he turned the car down onto the house’s drive, Hunk let out a muffled squeak.

“Keith, that’s not a house,” Pidge said slowly, pressing her face closer to the window. “That’s a mansion.”  

Keith had been young last time he was there, but Galra House was still so big it didn’t fit fully in his field of view. As a child, it had been vast, incomprehensible, exciting. He’d climbed the walls, using window sills and columns and holes left by the crumbling stonework as footholds. The house had been alive, then.

He climbed out of the car, feeling for the keys in his pocket, and stared up at the house. The old, arched windows stared back at him, black eyes set in a stone face stained brown by old rain. The sun glinted behind one of the chimneys, left them in shadow. A shiver went up Keith’s spine, as the wind picked up and rustles the leaves in the trees dotting the lawn

An abandoned house. It was dead. But it held Keith’s gaze and _watched._

“Keith,” Pidge called, waving him up to the front steps.

Keith shook his head to clear the fog. He’d gotten up before six and had been driving almost all day. He was exhausted. He hadn’t even noticed the others getting out of the car.

Galra House was old, but the lock on the door was new, and it opened with an easy turn of the key into the entrance hall. Keith felt another rush of weak, ancient memories, of sliding down the banisters of the staircase that filled half the room, of his mom scolding him for it while holding her laughter in, of rolling around on the soft carpet on lazy days when it was too hot to go outside. 

There was no carpet on the floor now, and the floorboards creaked beneath their feet, but the chandelier still hung from the ceiling. Keith flicked the lightswitch, and the tightness in his shoulders eased when the lights all turned on, bathing the hall in yellow light.

“This place is like a haunted house at an amusement park,” Lance observed, looking around with narrow eyes.

“No one’s been here in a while,” Keith muttered. He wiped his fingers over the wooden panelling that covered the bottom half of the walls, and they came away coated with dust.

“I didn’t say that was bad. I’m a connoisseur of haunted houses. This one could use some ghosts.”

“Don’t say that, Lance,” Hunk begged. “Does everything work? Krolia said everything would work, right? I remember _clearly_ she said—”

“Hunk, it’s fine. They’ve checked it over. The electricity, the gas, the pipes. There’s even wi-fi.”

“Oh, thank god,” Pidge said, then turned around and started walking back outside. “I’m getting my stuff. Make sure you give me the room with the best connection, Keith.”

It didn’t take long to carry all of their bags into the house and deposit them in a pile in the middle of the entrance hall. Keith pointed Hunk in the direction of the kitchen, and he disappeared with the groceries.

The bedrooms were all on the second floor, and Keith grabbed his bags and started up the stairs. The first step groaned under his weight, and for a moment he worried the wood had rotted and he’d fall through it.

“We could film, like, a horror movie here,” Lance said as he trailed after Keith. “Some fake blood, a mummy—”

“Why would there be a mummy here?”

“Shut up, Keith. Don’t be all logical. It doesn’t suit you.”

“What does _that_ mean?”

“It means you’re an id—”

“Boys, please stop fighting.” Pidge elbowed her way past them, almost invisible beneath all her bags.

“Mummies are cool,” Lance whispered when she was gone, and all Keith could do was sigh.

The air was dustier on the second floor. And it was much darker. There were some high, arched windows by the stairs that let in some light, but the sun was on the other side of the building. He felt along the wall for a switch for a few minutes before Pidge turned on the flashlight on her phone.

The corridor became otherworldly in the weak white light. The carpet below Keith’s feet stretched out into the distance, but he couldn’t see where it ended anymore. The light glinted off the paintings and turned the shadows long and large and deep. They moved, and reached out for Keith, like they were alive.

He shook his head. The shadows moved with the light. Of course they did.

He needed some sleep.

Finally the light flickered on and illuminated the hallway, and the shadows shrank and stopped moving. Keith pointed out the bathroom and which bedrooms had been cleared out, and picked one of them at random for himself.

Keith opened the door, threw his bags on the floor, and collapsed face-first on the bed.

He would put sheets on it later, he told himself before drifting away.

\---

Keith would have happily slept the rest of the day, but barely half an hour into his nap Lance crashed into his room and pulled him out of bed.

“Are you seriously gonna leave all the work to us?” he asked indignantly, not expecting an answer (which was yes).

He still had a tight grip around Keith’s wrist, and Keith’s limbs were too sluggish to put up much of a fight.

“You need to open these windows, by the way. The room’s all dusty.”

Lance let go of him and, after a few seconds of fiddling with them, thrust the windows all the way open.

“Did you seriously just face-plant onto the bed? You didn’t even wipe it off?”

“Tired,” Keith muttered, getting the feeling he had to defend himself.

“Keith, Keith, Keith,” Lance said, shaking his head. “What’re you gonna do if you get, like, lung cancer ‘cause you inhaled all that dust?”

“I’m—not sure that’s how lung cancer works.”

“Whatever. Come on. Hunk’s gonna make dinner, and _we_ are going to explore.”

Keith managed to pull on a new t-shirt, discarding the other one somewhere on the floor, and followed Lance back down the stairs. All of Lance’s bags had disappeared from the pile, which had made up the majority, and Keith wondered, not for the first time, whether Lance had brought his entire dorm with him.

It wasn’t entirely unlikely.

They found Hunk and Pidge in the kitchen, surrounded by cleaning supplies and bowls of some kind of marinade that spread a savory scent throughout the room. Pidge balanced precariously on a three-legged stool, completely enraptured by her game.

“Pidge, we just got here, you can’t just play your game all day.”

“Watch me.”

Lance plucked the console out of her hands and held it high above his head.

“I will break your legs,” Pidge said.

“Come on, Pidge,” Hunk said, placatingly, like you’d speak to an aggressive animal. “We’ve talked about threatening people.”

“I think you were talking to Keith, actually.”

Keith rolled his eyes.

He _had_ been talking to Keith. But Keith hadn’t threatened anyone in months.

Lance managed to bribe Pidge into going outside with them, and they left Hunk alone, whistling along to the radio and dicing carrots. Keith would have felt guilty not helping out, if he didn’t know Hunk was very particular when it came to cooking, and had banned all of them from helping him ever since they set his microwave on fire.

Keith followed Lance, who headed straight for the kitchen door, unlatched it, and jumped out into the warm afternoon air. It was still on the hot side, but the scent of cut grass and pine trees chased away the dust in Keith’s lungs and woke him up. Someone must have come by and mowed the lawn  recently, though the overgrown trees, bushes and flower beds had been left alone. Ancient, gnarled apple trees dotted the gentle grass slope that went down to the road, the drive cutting through the green of the grass like a painted stripe.

The gravel path (which had more weeds than gravel) crunched beneath Keith’s feet as they followed it towards the boundary between forest and house grounds. It didn’t look like it used to. Galra House had been many things, but never wild, untamed. Never overgrown. He could just about remember rolling down the grass slope, but each time his eyes fastened on one of the bent and broken trees, on the forest in the process of reclaiming the gardens, he jolted out of the memory.

“Where does this path go?” Lance asked, once they reached a rotten gate set in a low stone wall. The path continued through it.

“Up that hill and through the forest,” Keith said. “It goes pretty far, but I wouldn’t suggest leaving the grounds. People can be a bit trigger-happy around here.”

He jumped over the wall, leaving the gate alone. It looked like it’d fall apart if he even touched it.

“I thought this area was popular with tourists?” Lance said.

“Not this side of Arus, actually,” Pidge said before Keith could reply. “All of the land around here is private property, while the western and northern parts are all part of the Balmera Reserve.”

Beyond the gate the path faded from gravel to packed dirt. For a few minutes all Keith could see were the pines towering above them on either side and patches of blue sky through the branches. The forest thickened and the house disappeared from view. It was quiet, all he could hear was a whisper of birdsong from somewhere above, and the soft rustling of small creatures in the dry underbrush.  

They walked up the path until they crested the hill, where the trees didn’t block the view. Keith couldn’t remember standing in that spot before, but the scene that burned into his retinas felt familiar: dark green forests enveloped Galra House on all sides like a besieging army; rugged mountain peaks jutted out of the land, some still capped with snow, neverending and fading into the blue of the sky. He knew the view, the tilt of the house, the sun that reflected off the windows and turned it golden rather than grim.

None of the abuse the house had suffered in the past ten years was visible from that angle, and Keith could pretend everything was like it had once been. He imagined his parents playing tennis on the lawn, himself and his cousin running around in and out of the house, and he could almost see his aunt walking along the corridor on the second floor, pulling apart the curtains to let in the sun except—

Keith’s parents weren’t on the lawn, and his aunt wasn’t in the house. The windows were all closed.

But the curtains moved anyway.

He narrowed his eyes against the sun. The fabric fluttered, like they were caught in the wind, or someone walked too close. First at one window. Then the next. Then the curtains stilled like they had never moved at all.

Keith’s gaze stayed frozen for a second, and then he swept it over the rest of the house. All the curtains were drawn on the sides of the house he could see, and none of them shifted even the slightest. But he’d _seen_ them move.

The wind. It had to be the wind, even though he could barely feel it brush against his cheek, and the windows were all closed.

Or, no, that wasn’t entirely true. Lance had opened his window. And it wasn’t as if the house was empty, either. Hunk was there. Maybe he’d gone up to the second floor for some reason—

“You okay, man?”

Keith jerked out of his thoughts and whipped around. Lance had retracted his hands and held them up in an appeasing manner. Keith blinked and rubbed a hand over his face.

“Sorry. Just thinking about something.”

“You shouldn’t space out right at the edge of a cliff.”

Keith glanced down at the steep drop that started just a few feet away, and took a step back. He hadn’t noticed.

“Keith looks like he’s about to pass out,” Pidge said. “I think we should go back to the house.”

Both Keith and Lance knew the real reason Pidge wanted to go back to the house was so she could play her game. But Lance had apparently had enough of sight-seeing for the day, and they made their way back down the hill, careful to not stumble in any of the roots that stuck up all over the path.

Keith looked back up at the second floor windows, but saw no movement.

The house was empty and still.

\---

Dinner was a quieter affair than it usually was with the four of them, but they were all exhausted from the drive and the heat. The dining room door was locked, and Keith hadn’t found the key, so they ended up eating around the small table in the kitchen. By the end of dinner they were all half-asleep, and Keith wanted nothing more than to lie down on the nearest couch and forget about all the work that lay ahead of them. It would be a long month.

“What’s Krolia even planning on using this place for?” Lance asked while vigorously scrubbing one of the pans clean.

Keith lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug. “Work. Her and Kolivan are planning something to do with Marmora.”

“This place has no light pollution to speak of, so that’d make sense,” Pidge said. She’d shirked her cleaning-up duty, and though Keith hadn’t turned around, he could hear the _click-click_ of buttons.

“And this place is _huge,”_ Hunk added, with extra emphasis on the word. “And empty, too. It’d be perfect for Marmora.”

Keith blinked slowly. Something about that …

“That reminds me, Hunk,” he said, slowly collecting his thoughts together. “Did you leave the kitchen while we were out?”

“Huh?” Hunk frowned. “Nah, don’t think so. Why?”

“Nothing, really. It just looked like something was moving in one of the windows.”

_“Something?”_ Lance asked, voice going high-pitched. “What do you mean, something?”

“I thought you wanted a horror movie.”

“Not a real one, Pidge!”

Hunk had gone a little pale, and Keith decided it wasn’t worth pressing the point.

“It was probably just a draft. We left my window open, right, Lance?”

Lance blinked and then regained his composure like he’d never lost it.

“Right, right, right, that’s right.” He lightly shoved Keith’s shoulder. “Can’t scare us that easily.”

Keith rolled his eyes, and the subject changed to something else, but the thought stayed at the back of his mind. It was an unreasonable, alien sensation. He’d never been superstitious. Even when his friends talked about conspiracy theories or the supernatural, he always dismissed it. There was always a logical explanation.

But Galra House, with its long, shadowed corridors and multitude of corners and empty rooms made the back of his neck crawl. It felt like he was missing something.

Keith had left his window open. But not his door.

He dismissed the thoughts each time they surfaced, berated himself each time he heard a creak or thud and wanted to turn around and look. Giving in would make him feel worse, more paranoid.

By the time he’d brushed his teeth and was making his way back to his room, the house was quiet and the others had already gone to bed. The carpet muffled his footsteps, and he couldn’t hear any strange sounds. He still held his breath until he turned off the hall lights and could close the door behind him.

Keith’s room was bathed in shadow, and a faint breeze brushed against his skin. He reached out for the light switch on the wall and froze.

He wasn’t alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title taken from "Time After Time" by Cyndi Lauper.
> 
> I've had this idea since around August, and though it's pretty different now from what it was in the beginning, I'm really happy to finally be doing something with it! I'll be writing this as I go, but it's all planned out, and if I'm right, there's going to be around 15 chapters in total. I'm on [twitter](https://twitter.com/delethean) if you have any questions!
> 
> Thank you for reading!


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith struggles with the realization that something is going on in Galra House, wanting to dismiss it completely but finding that it's impossible, as more and more strange occurrences start happening around him.

Keith wasn’t alone.

There was a shadow by his bed—shaped like a man and far darker than the surrounding shadows. It didn’t move.

Keith’s hand was still reaching out for the light switch, but his entire body was frozen and none of his muscles obeyed him. And he didn’t want to see. If he turned the light on, he would know—what he would know escaped him.  

“Lance?” he whispered. It wasn’t Lance. He knew it wasn’t Lance.

The shadow shifted, like it turned towards him. Before, it could have been mistaken for anything. Now Keith could distinguish broad shoulders, an arm, outlined by the window behind.

Keith swallowed; dread grasped at his throat and lungs. He wanted to speak—to scream. He could do neither.

“You can see me?”

The voice sent a shockwave through Keith. It was male, but faint, like someone speaking from far away, and it was entirely unfamiliar. Not Lance. Not Hunk. Not anyone he knew. Someone had broken into the house, into his room. A flash of anger displaced his fear, and he opened his mouth to speak.

Before he could, the shadow melted into the darkness and disappeared. 

Keith stayed where he was, incapable of movement, for a long time, though he didn’t know how long. He stared at the spot the shadow had been, but he couldn’t see anything there. After his heartbeat calmed down and his panic faded, he started questioning whether he’d really seen anything at all.

He flicked the switch on the wall and a soft yellow light flooded the room. Empty.

Keith’s bags were still on the floor, the t-shirt he wore earlier folded on the bed, one of the windows was open. There was no sign that there had been anyone by the bed: the dust on the floor was untouched. But he  _ had  _ seen someone. Someone with broad shoulders, taller than both Lance and Hunk.

For a second he thought that maybe someone had come through the window, or escaped through it, but that was impossible. The open window was on the other side of the bed from where the person had been standing.

A wave of exhaustion hit him, and he staggered forward and reached out for one of the bedposts to steady himself. He rubbed at his face.

He’d seen a shadow that looked like a person. Had heard the shadow speak. But he was tired, and last time he’d been in bed he’d slept badly.

Keith had obviously imagined the whole thing. He hadn’t seen anyone. He hadn’t heard anyone speak. Exhaustion, being back in an empty house he’d last been in ten years before, even the sound of the wind in the rafters, all of those things could have contributed. Hell, he might even be sleeping already.

There were no signs of a real person having been in the room. And although Galra House  _ looked  _ like it could be haunted, it wasn’t.

After all, ghosts didn’t exist.

\---

Keith didn’t sleep much that night. His survival instinct buzzed, and he spent hours staring up at the ceiling, listening intently for anything that sounded out of place, trying to convince himself that what he’d seen wasn’t real. By the time bright sunlight filtered in through the curtains, he’d largely succeeded. He’d only heard the thumps and creaks that were normal to hear in old, quiet houses, and while Keith would readily admit (to himself) that he was on the paranoid side, he did  _ not  _ believe in the supernatural. If he couldn’t see, hear, or touch it, it wasn’t real.

He calmly ignored the the fact that he had both seen and heard something the night before.

The fact was that he’d already worked himself up before he got to his room. Of course he’d misinterpret a shadow that could have been the result of anything. Like a cloud in front of the moon. And he’d heard the wind, not a person’s voice.

Keith had arrived at the point where only one out of three thoughts concerned the events of the previous night, when he walked down to breakfast. It had taken a lot of convincing to arrive at that point. 

Hunk was already in the kitchen when he walked in, but, unsurprisingly, neither of the other two were there.

“Good morning!” Hunk said, poking at the eggs and bacon he was frying on the stove.

“Morning.”

“You sound dead tired. Didn’t sleep?”

Keith rubbed at his eyes. “Not used to sleeping in unfamiliar places.”

“I get that. I didn’t sleep much, either.” Hunk found two plates and loaded them up with food, then swung around and placed one in front of Keith.

“Thanks.”

“No problem, man.”

Keith looked at Hunk just as he was about to take a bite. The piece of bacon slid off his fork. Although Keith didn’t feel great that morning, Hunk looked like an absolute wreck. He was pale, had dark bruises under his eyes, and his dark hair stuck up wildly.

“Hunk, are you okay?” he asked, alarmed.

“Huh? Oh …” Hunk laughed, but it sounded forced. “Yeah, I didn’t sleep much, as I said. After what you and Lance said last night—and then I went up to my room, and I swore I’d put my toothbrush on my bed, but I turned around and it wasn’t there, and I couldn’t find it, and I didn’t think much of it until I went to sleep, but then I started hearing all these weird noises, and it sounded like someone was walking around, and I just—”

Hunk took a deep, calming breath. “It was a bad night. This place is a bit too big for me, I think.”

“It’s an old house,” Keith said, for both Hunk’s sake and his own. “It’s bound to have lots of strange noises.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” Hunk’s smile seemed a bit more genuine.

They ate their breakfast and chatted about unrelated things for a while, and Hunk started looked much better. Keith felt better, too, although Hunk’s confession that he’d also experienced something out of the ordinary had sent a wave of uncertainty through him.

It was a coincidence. It had to be. They’d riled each other up. And Hunk was a bit of a scaredy-cat when it came to the supernatural. If he’d seen a person in his room, he would have said so. But that had definitely just been a figment of Keith’s imagination.

When Lance and Pidge eventually wandered in, it was late morning. Keith felt warm and sleepy, and had almost dozed off in his chair.

“What’s the plan for today?” Lance asked once he’d gotten himself something to eat.

Both Lance and Pidge looked like they’d slept through the entire night without any worries.

“We need to figure out where we should start working,” Keith said. “There are a lot of rooms to cover.”

Lance groaned. “Come on, Keith, we just got here.”

“That’s the entire reason we even  _ came  _ here, Lance.”

“Keith’s right,” Pidge said. “We’re not here just to relax.”

“Fine, fine. Where should we start, then?”

Keith shrugged. “Wherever, I guess. Some of the rooms on the ground floor have just been used for storage, so we can probably clear them out, first.”

“Sounds like a good plan to me.”

After they’d all finished eating and getting ready, they assembled in the entrance hall and headed down the corridor on the opposite side from the one that led to the kitchen. Many of the rooms in the house weer locked, and while Keith had all of the keys, there were a lot of them, and it would take a long time to match the right key to the right door. Thankfully, the rooms he’d been thinking about were open. They were at the end of the long corridor, right next to each other and connected internally by a door, and had been used mostly for storage ever since Keith was young, as far as he could remember. Krolia had told him that was still the case.

It didn’t prepare Keith for what met him on the other side of the first door he opened. Furniture and large paintings were stacked from floor to ceiling on one side of the room, while there were dozens of large cardboard boxes on the other side. An inch-thick layer of dust covered it all, and he couldn’t even see the windows on the wall opposite.

The dusty air made him sneeze.

“I’m not going in there,” Lance said, a stubborn set to his mouth.

“When was the last time  _ anyone  _ went in there?” Pidge asked, eyes sweeping over the contents, though she was also firmly standing outside, and showed no intention of coming any closer.

Keith didn’t know. He hadn’t asked.

He carefully picked his way inside, sneaking around the stacks of stuff, until he got to the row of windows, and managed to unlatch and open one of them to let in some fresh air.

“We need to take all the furniture and the paintings into the entrance hall, and go through all the boxes, too, while we’re at it.”

“But then the entrance hall will be full,” Lance pointed out.

Keith rolled his eyes.

“Someone’s gonna come by at some other time and pick it up. Most of it’s going into storage until mom can come down and look at it.”

“Ooooh,” Lance said. “Should’ve said that earlier.”

“I guess we can just grab some of this stuff and get started, then,” Hunk suggested with an easy smile. There was no trace of the earlier anxiety left in his behavior.

The first room was too full for them to be able to go through the stuff there, anyway, so they carried everything that was easily accessible out. Most of the furniture was stacked on top of each other, which meant it was tricky to move without making anything fall. However, several of the paintings were just jammed into the free spaces in between, and the cardboard boxes, although heavy, weren’t piled as high, or as precariously.

In just over two hours they’d barely made a dent. A few square feet just by the door were emptied out, and showed the stained wooden flooring that had been underneath. Dust that had been displaced by their movements whirled through the air. Keith was covered in sweat, and he felt grimy, like all the dust and dirt was sticking to his skin and his clothes.

He carried another box out and after setting it down by the rest of them, he collapsed onto the floor next to Lance.

“Why … did I sign up for this?” Lance asked, staring up at the ceiling, arms spread out wide on the floor.

“Because you wanted to go to the mountains,” Keith supplied helpfully.

Lance lifted his arm and let it fall heavily on Keith’s chest.

“You lied to me. I was getting ready for the outdoors hiking life. Can’t believe I’m stuck inside on such a beautiful day.”

“Lance, you hate dirt and bugs and sleeping outside.”

“Shut up, Keith.”

“Make me.”

Lance had already rolled over and started squishing Keith’s face when Pidge hit him in the back of the head with a rolled up magazine.

“Why are you always on his side?” Lance asked, clutching dramatically at his head.

Pidge blinked at him owlishly.

“Because Krolia terrifies me.”

Lance let out a loud sigh and flopped back down again. Keith snorted. Pidge sat down next to both of them and pulled out her game from one of her pockets. Apparently everyone had momentarily given up.

Keith turned over and looked at the haphazard pile of boxes and large framed paintings that covered the floor. The paintings that weren’t wrapped and hidden from view were all dull and yellowed, like there was a layer of grime on top of the paint. But they were easy enough to deal with. The boxes, however, had to be looked through at least superficially and then marked, so Krolia knew more or less what was in them. Even though she was coming down at some time during the month, and then later in July, she wouldn’t have a lot of time and energy. The more Keith and his friends did, the less she had to do. If anyone deserved as much help as she could get, it was his mom.

Lance, who’d grown bored of staying still, started picking through one of the boxes and lifted out small ornate plates and a crystal vase. Then Keith saw him frown and tug at a piece of pale fabric. It came loose, and he pulled it out.

It was a ribbon, stained brown in some places and so washed out Keith couldn’t tell what color it had been originally. One end of it was torn and ragged.

“Why’s this in here?” Lance asked, fiddling with it.

“It probably belongs to—”

_ dark everything was dark and he couldn’t see just her her sob where are you where are you and he reached out but couldn’t find her just her ribbon and he pulled pulled pulled until it ripped—  _

Keith had reached out for the ribbon without thinking, and jerked back like he’d been burned. The images were painfully clear for another second, and then slipped away from him.

“It’s probably Allura’s,” he said finally. Weird. He could have sworn … 

“Lance’s eyebrows rose, and then he waggled them suggestively.

“Who’s  _ Allura?”  _ He asked. “Is she your girlfriend? Childhood sweetheart?”

“Lance, you know I’m not—”

“Fine, fine, yes, I know you’re not.” He still looked at him with an expectant expression.

“Allura lives—or lived in the area. She used to come over when we were kids.”

“Is she pretty?” Lance asked, because of course he did.

Keith tried to remember what Allura had looked like, but could only recall vague details. Hair so pale it was practically white, dark skin, blue eyes.

“I don’t know. Haven’t seen her since the funeral.”

Lance and Pidge stared at him, horrified, and Keith realized exactly what that had sounded like.

“No, I don’t mean she’s dead,” he said, quickly backtracking. “Her father’s funeral. It was eight years ago, I think. We were still kids. I don’t even know if she still lives here.”

“Oh my god, dude,” Lance said with a groan. “I thought you were about to say she died in this house or something.”

Lance put the ribbon down again, stood up, and stretched.

“Where’s Hunk?”

“Kitchen,” Pidge said, getting up, too. “I’m starving.”

Hunk was, indeed, in the kitchen, scurrying about and opening all of the cabinets. There was a harried look to him, and when he heard them come in, he whirled around, eyes wide. He sank back against the kitchen counter when he saw who it was.

“What’s going on?” Pidge asked.

“I don’t know!” Hunk said, sounding exasperated. “I was gonna start making lunch ‘cause I figured we were all getting hungry, and I put my phone down for literally a second, and when I turn back around, it’s gone!”

“What do you mean, it’s gone?” Keith looked at the counters, which were filled with so much stuff it’d be hard to find anything there.

“I can’t find it anywhere. I’ve looked all over the kitchen.”

“You probably left it somewhere else,” Pidge said, tone dismissive, but Keith knew she was just trying to calm Hunk down. “It’s not like someone took it.”

Hunk paled, and glanced over at Keith. That had backfired. 

“What if someone did?” he whispered.

“Wouldn’t you have heard if someone broke in?”

“I guess …” Hunk seemed to collapse in on himself. “What if it wasn’t a person?”

Keith hadn’t wanted to think of that possibility, but his brain immediately jumped on it, and it spun out of control for a moment. It was a ghost, a demon—a murderer hiding in the house, who would slowly drive them all out of their minds before killing them one by one.

Lance laughed awkwardly. “What are you talking about, Hunk? Like, a spirit stole your phone?”

“I don’t know!” Hunk said. “I just know that my phone’s missing and I heard footsteps last night and this place is giving me seriously bad vibes.”

“We’ll find your phone,” Keith said, before things went more out of hand, before his own paranoia became stronger. “Pidge is probably right. You must have left it in a different room.”

Hunk couldn’t calm down enough to eat lunch before they started, and they decided to look around the ground floor to see if they could find the phone. They double-checked the kitchen, which contained a lot of things that shouldn’t have been there, like a jar of tiny bones and some teeth, but there was no phone anywhere. It took them until they’d searched both corridors and all the open rooms near the kitchen before Pidge took out her phone and called Hunk.

At first it was completely quiet, but then Keith heard a faint melody that they followed to the room they’d been clearing out. It came from one of the cardboard boxes. He opened it, and there it was: Hunk’s phone, vibrating on top of some old books.

“See, it must have slipped in while you were here.”

Hunk looked uncertain, but nodded slowly, and grabbed his phone.

“You’re probably right.” Hunk stared at his phone for a few more seconds. “That must be what happened.”

Hunk was unusually quiet all through lunch.

Keith couldn’t think of anything to say that would make him feel better without laying bare his own fears, so he kept his mouth shut on that topic and eventually forgot most of his worries. After lunch, they cleared out some more boxes from the room and put them together with the others, and then called it a day.

The sun was still warm in the afternoon, but it wasn’t as hot as it had been earlier. They spread some blankets on the lawn outside and lay down to enjoy their vacation for a few hours. Nothing to do except relax and drink some beer and tease Lance when he freaked out about a spider. When they eventually went back inside again, Keith felt well-rested and completely at ease, and any residual thoughts on the issue of ghosts and missing phones had disappeared.

\---

Keith had just finished doing the dishes after dinner when his phone rang. He almost declined the call before he saw the caller id. It was Krolia.

“Hi, mom,” he said when he picked up, slowly finishing up in the kitchen so he could go upstairs.

“Hey, sweetie,” his mom said, and somehow, when he heard her voice, tension Keith hadn’t even noticed melted away. “How’s the house?”

“Old. Dusty.”

His mom laughed. “Well, it’s been pretty empty for a while, you know. Did you get there okay?”

“Yeah.”

“That old road is probably overgrown by now, right? I had Antok mow the lawn when he was there to check over the pipes, but there’s probably a lot of weeds and dead plants. Well, it was always obvious how ancient the place is, even when you were a kid.”

“What about when you were a kid?” Keith asked, turning the lights off in the kitchen and closing the door behind him.

“Hmmm,” Krolia said, thinking. “Not, it was pretty old then, too. I’ve seen pictures, though, and it used to be beautiful.”

They were both quiet for a moment, their shared reserved natures getting the better of them, like it did in any conversation between the two, despite Krolia’s best efforts.

“Have you and your friends started working on the place? And how are they liking it?”

“We started today. Hunk’s a bit suspicious, though. He thinks the place is haunted.”

Krolia laughed again. “Somehow I’m not surprised. What do you think, then?”

“I’m … not sure.”

“Do you still not like the house? I didn’t think you’d still feel that way, now that you’re older.”

Keith frowned. “What do you mean?”

“When you were a kid you suddenly started talking about how you hated it there, and neither me nor your father could convince you to go back next summer. I was a bit surprised when you volunteered to help me out, to be honest.”

He couldn’t remember that at all. He’d always thought they didn’t go back to the house because Krolia had had a disagreement with his aunt. They’d fallen out with that side of the family, and last Keith had seen them was at Allura’s father’s funeral. His frown deepened, and he was about to ask for more details when his mom changed the subject.

“Sometimes kids get weird ideas, or so your father told me. Just call Antok when you want some of the things moved. He’ll help you guys out. I have to go now. My flight’s about to leave. Bye. Love you.”

Keith barely had the time to say ‘I love you’ back before Krolia hung up. He didn’t move for a moment. What had she meant by that? Keith couldn’t remember much from his summers in the house, that was true, but to think he’d actively disliked being there … he couldn’t remember a single reason or event that might have caused it.

He’d had his friends there, and he clearly recalled how much fun he had with them. Which reminded him. Allura’s ribbon. If she still lived in Arus, maybe he could give it back to her. Keith, who’d been half-way up the stairs at that point, headed back down to the hall.

On second thought, she probably didn’t want an old, torn ribbon. But Keith still wanted to look at it, somehow. He flipped open the lid of the box with the ornamental plates, and blinked. He’d seen Lance put the ribbon back.

But it was no longer there.

\---

Keith and the others went to bed early that night, exhausted from the day’s work. There was no shadow in Keith’s room when he opened the door, and his things were all where they were supposed to be. He still checked the closet, under the bed, and left all the windows locked. If it  _ had  _ been an intruder, at least they couldn’t get in through there, and couldn’t be hiding already.

For a while, he lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling, thinking about all of the little incidents that had happened, all of the little comments he’d heard. They didn’t seem like they fit together, or at least, it didn’t make sense to Keith. It felt like he had five pieces of a thousand piece puzzle. The old man, and the lady at the store—well, they hadn’t said much. A few comments about the house, weird expressions. It didn’t have to mean anything. But Hunk was worse. He might be easily unsettled, but he was Keith’s friend. If it had been Lance, he wouldn’t have believed anything he said. Hunk wouldn’t lie to him, or trick him, though.

His own experiences were both easier and harder to ignore. He knew he’d been tired the day before. The moving curtains, the figure—easily figments of his imagination, or due to natural phenomena. The missing ribbon could also be explained. Maybe Lance had put it in one of the other boxes without Keith noticing. Maybe he’d taken it because it had once belonged to a pretty girl. But why had Krolia said that he hadn’t liked the house when he was young? And why couldn’t Keith remember?

And he’d had a strange feeling since he’d arrived. Like there was something he was overlooking. He just didn’t know what it was.

Keith fell asleep eventually, those thoughts whirling around inside his head, once second dismissed and shoved away, the next brought back just as compelling as before. His dreams were disjointed; flashes of color, images that made no sense to him. He let the dream tug him alone until he started awake, and sat up quickly, still disoriented but with a racing heartbeat and the impression that he wasn’t alone.

Moonlight filtered in through the curtains. The room was empty.

Keith’s heart didn’t calm down. He turned on the bedside lamp, but the extra light revealed nothing out of the ordinary. Just a bare room, the doors to the closet and to the corridor both shut. He carefully leaned out over the edge of the bed and checked beneath it. Nothing there, either.

He sat still for a while, waiting for himself to calm down, but while his pulse quieted somewhat, the sensation of not being alone didn’t leave. It just got stronger, building and building until it was intolerable.

Keith got out of bed, pulled on a t-shirt, and went out into the corridor. Haunted house or no, he couldn’t stay in that room a second longer. He headed down the stairs and to the kitchen.

Everything was completely quiet. The house was asleep, and so was the wind.

Keith got a glass out of one of the cabinets and poured himself a glass of water. He looked out the window, glass in his hand, at the sloping grass lawns and the black forest just beyond them. Perfect set for a horror movie indeed. He could practically imagine monsters of various kinds lurking in the shadows beneath the trees, watching, waiting, until one of them innocently wandered close enough and was torn apart. It didn’t fright Keith. Not really. Horror movies of that genre had never had an impact, too far-fetched. An axe murderer was far more likely, and Keith could defend himself from that threat, so it didn’t scare him, either.

Not knowing was worse. Had someone been in his room? Was someone in the house with them? It was unlikely, but possible. Lance had once watched a documentary about a stranger living in a family’s house for years without them knowing. Lance had been terrified, and searched every nook and cranny of their dorm. Keith had dismissed the idea then. But now, in Galra House, where no one had been in over half the rooms in years, where there were no doubt secret passages and spaced where you could hide for months without discovery … 

He made up his mind to search his bedroom thoroughly the next day. Just in case.

Keith turned around, calm enough to return upstairs. Except when he glanced at the room in front of him, something felt off. He frowned, let his eyes trace over the benches, the cabinets, the table …

There were two main doors that led in and out of the kitchen. One went to the corridor, the other to the garden. But there was a third door, which Keith had barely paid attention to earlier. It led to the basement.

And it was currently open.

Keith stared at it for a moment. It was only barely open, but beyond it all he could see was a wall of black. The lights in the kitchen were off, so no light could reach to illuminate the stairs he knew were there. He couldn’t remember ever going down them, however, and didn’t know what was below.

What he did know was this: the door had not been open when he entered the kitchen.

It would have been almost impossible to miss. After all, the clearest view of the basement door was from the entrance, and it had only been by chance now that he looked in that direction. But when he entered, he hadn’t registered that anything was wrong. He would have been too keyed up to not notice.

Hesitating, he tested to see whether the door to the garden was locked, and then the windows. They were. Not a draft, most likely. But it was an old door. It could have opened on its own.

Keith swallowed. He just needed to close it. His paranoia was getting out of hand.

He approached the door, decisive and unwavering, and reached for the handle. There was still only darkness inside.

A sudden thump sounded from behind, and Keith saw a flash of white in the corner of his eye. He whipped his head around to look. Nothing. He turned back to the door. It was open wide. Something icy cold wrapped around his ankles, and tugged.

With a yelp, Keith stumbled forward. For a moment he was in a free fall. Then his back hit the stairs hard and he crashed the rest of the way down, landing in a heap at the bottom. Sharp pain screamed from his entire body, he couldn’t breathe, he didn’t know which way was up of down. There was hard stone somewhere—under him, maybe. The air was cold and damp. And it was dark. Keith saw nothing.

His heartbeat thundered in his ears as he lay there gasping. He couldn’t hear anything except his pulse for a long time. Then he did, and wished he hadn’t. A soft scratching noise came from all around him.  _ Scritch scritch scritch,  _ like claws on stone.

The first thing he thought was ‘rats.’

Something cold brushed against his hand just after, and his thoughts turned to white, whistling static. “Run,” a voice whispered in his ear.

He yelled when he pushed himself to his knees, and waved his arms around, desperately trying to find the stairs. One of his hands touched a step, and Keith half-crawled and half-dragged himself up, up, up, the scratching sound constant and everywhere around him and all he could think about was the faint outline of the door frame at the top of the stairs.

Keith spilled out onto the tiled kitchen floor, and dragged himself further away from the door. He was shaking, trembling like a dry leaf caught by the wind. He gasped for breath, but it was like he couldn’t get enough air, and spots danced in front of his eyes.

When he turned to look behind him, the basement door was closed. He looked at it, mouth open, for maybe ten seconds before he got to his feet and ran.

It wasn’t until the door to his bedroom slammed shut and he sank down against it that he stopped moving.

Keith didn’t sleep any more that night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a long week of writing for me, but this chapter is finally finished! Shiro's gonna be properly introduced sometime soon. Thank you so much for reading! If you have any questions, feel free to ask either here or on [twitter](https://twitter.com/delethean)


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hunk is convinced the house is haunted. Keith is starting to think that, too.

Keith spent all night staring up at the ceiling, his knife clutched in one hand, ignoring the dull pain in his back, his legs, his arms, until it numbed and he could no longer feel it. It was easy enough to think of nothing—he was still paralyzed by something he didn’t want to call fear, but felt a lot like it. When the sun rose and his eyes were dry and itchy, he told himself to get up, and instead everything faded into a warm kind of nothingness. The next time he opened his eyes, his room was bright and golden with the sun, and when he checked his phone, he saw it was almost eleven.

He groaned and sat up, and regretted his decision immediately. Each movement sent a wave of pain through him. He stumbled to the mirror on the wall and took off his shirt, and winced. New bruises covered his arms and his back, his knees were scraped up badly, something he hadn’t experienced since he was a kid.

“What the hell happened last night?” he asked his reflection.

His reflection didn’t answer.

But Keith remembered easily enough, for once. He’d gone down into the kitchen, and then, somehow, he’d fallen down the staircase to the basement. Something cold had grabbed his legs and—no. It had been dark, and Keith had tripped, probably he’d stumbled on the threshold. There were no lights in the basement, and it was probably rat infested. He’d heard scratching. Keith wasn’t squeamish, but being surrounded by rats in the dark wasn’t his idea of a good experience.

And the more he thought about it, the more he questioned it. It all felt like a dream, more than a real experience. He could have gotten the bruises just by falling out of bed.

It had been a nightmare. Definitely. Nightmare. That was it.

Keith took a long shower before he even thought about heading downstairs. When he felt clean and human again, the next step would be breakfast. The others had probably eaten already, so he could just fix himself something easy and start tidying. He got dressed, and then slowly headed for the stairs.

“Hey, Keith,” Hunk’s voice called after him.

Hunk stood just outside the door to his room.

“Good morning,” Keith said. His throat was dry.

Hunk frowned and looked him over. Keith had tried his best to find something to wear that’d cover the bruises, but it was summer, not sweater weather, so his arms and legs were still bare.

“You okay, man?” he asked eventually.

Keith shrugged. “I guess.”

“You sure?” Hunk hesitated. “Look, I saw you come back up to your room last night. Limping.”

“Did I wake you?”

Hunk shook his head. “Nah. Wasn’t asleep. Footsteps, y’know? Did something happen? No offence, but you look pretty terrible.”

Keith hadn’t noticed Hunk, but then again, he’d been pretty preoccupied. It did dash his hopes of the entire thing being a dream, though that didn’t necessarily mean ghosts were involved.

“I’m fine, Hunk. No worries. I just tripped and fell ‘cause I didn’t turn on any lights when I went to get a glass of water.”   

Hunk did not look convinced. “Uh-huh. I believe you. Totally.”

“Where are Pidge and Lance?” Keith asked, changing the subject in an effort to get away from that conversation. Even thinking about the possibility that it wasn’t a dream or that he hadn’t just scared himself made him go cold all over.

“Lance is outside. Tanning, I’d say, except he has a parasol and he's covered in so much sunscreen I’m pretty sure he can’t even feel the heat. Pidge is doing Pidge Stuff. In her room. I’m not gonna interrupt her.”

Interrupting Pidge when she was doing Pidge Stuff was generally a bad idea. Keith and Hunk glanced at her closed door and, after a moment of silence, heard a loud crash and muffled swearing from inside.

They moved further away.

“Have you slept?” Keith asked. He knew he could function pretty well on little sleep, though he tended to start stabbing people if it went on for too long, but the last time he’d seen Hunk pull an all-nighter to study for an exam, the guy had passed out right after. Though that might have been the stress.

Hunk’s laugh was strained. “A bit. Okay, those footsteps are starting to creep me out a bit.”

Starting to? A bit? If Keith hadn’t been worried about him, he would have laughed.

“We can’t all be fearless like you, Keith,” Hunk said, like he’d read his mind, and sniffed. “And I’m not the one who ran back to my room like the devil was chasing me last night. Also, is that a _knife?”_

Keith looked down at the knife he’d stuffed into his pocket. Then he looked back up at Hunk, serious.

“No.”

“Are you sure you didn’t take us here to sacrifice us to some heathen gods?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t _think_ so? Keith!”

Keith left Hunk on the landing, and went in search of food.  

Lance couldn’t be dragged back inside, and neither of them wanted to disturb Pidge, and so Keith and Hunk ended up on tidying duty. Antok had been called, and he’d stop by sometime the day after to pick up some of the boxes and paintings. The two of them spent several hours carrying heavy cardboard boxes into the entrance hall, until they’d cleared almost all of them out of the room.

By the end, Keith was drenched with sweat, and every bruise and scrape on his body protested vigorously. The two sleepless nights were starting to wear on him.

“Let’s open these windows,” Hunk suggested as they stood in the half-cleared room and examined their handiwork. “I’m not sure if there’s more dust or air in here.”

Two of the windows opened (fairly) easily, but the last two had rotten frames, and Keith didn’t want to tell his mom he’d managed to destroy parts of her house.

Without all the boxes, the room, which had seemed small and cramped before, was huge. An old couch was pushed up against one of the walls, and a few matching chairs were in the corners. Though the floor was badly stained and the wallpaper, which must have been ugly even when it was new, was peeling off the walls, it was easy enough to imagine rich, early 20th century ladies sitting there, drinking tea and talking about whatever rich people of that time period talked about.

It was harder to imagine himself living in the place.

Keith hadn’t had a bad life, over all, but aside from his childhood summers, he’d lived in pretty small houses, and they’d never had a lot of money. The years after his dad’s death when his mom couldn’t take care of him and he’d been shuffled around to various relatives had had a pretty big impact on his relationship with money. That was a long time ago, though, and he tried not to think about it too much. He’d gotten into college, his mom was happy (and healthy) working with Kolivan and the Marmora Foundation, he had friends who obviously cared about him enough to follow him into the middle of nowhere for an entire month. Even so, he didn’t feel at all connected to his ancestors.

Well. It wasn’t like the family was rich anymore, anyway. He didn’t need to feel connected to them.

“Keith, do you think there are any empty boxes somewhere?” Hunk asked, breaking Keith’s train of thought. “These are all really full. It might be smart to spread things out a bit, so nothing falls out.”

“There should be some …” Keith frowned. “In one of the closets, I think mom said. I’ll go look.”

Keith left Hunk and headed towards the entrance hall. The front door was open to let in some air, and he could see Lance sitting under a big parasol he’d either found in the house or brought with him. Considering the neon blue color, it probably belonged to Lance. Keith rolled his eyes.

He hadn’t explored much of the ground floor yet beyond the kitchen and the room they’d been tidying, but he remembered Krolia mentioning that she left some cardboard boxes somewhere in case they needed any. He wandered down the corridor, trying to figure out which doors led to closets and small storage rooms, opening all the ones that were open. Most of them led to large rooms that were either filled with stuff or almost completely empty.

Maybe he’d remembered wrong? He could always call his mom and double-check …

The next door he opened led to a small closet, with a stack of flat packed cardboard boxes leaning against the wall. He hadn’t remembered wrong, but he couldn’t figure out why Krolia thought it was a good idea to put them _there._

Keith grabbed as many as he could carry, and made his way back to Hunk. Halfway down the corridor, he paused. One of the doors was open. He thought he’d closed all of them behind him. He shrugged, put the boxes down, and went inside, feeling a little curious.

It was mostly empty, like so many of the other rooms. The wooden frame of a couch stood pushed against one wall, and there was a white-painted door on the wall opposite, which probably went to the neighboring room. The entire room was very pale, even the floor, which was covered in a carpet so faded it was almost impossible to make out the original pattern

The only interesting part of the room was the free-standing gilded mirror, which clashed with the spartan paleness of the rest of the room. Keith wandered over to it. He traced his hand over the frame, fingers brushing through the layer of dust covering it. It was old, one of those silver-coated mirrors, the surface tarnished in several spots. Keith wondered if someone had moved it there at some point, since it seemed so at odds with its surroundings. If they had, it hadn’t been recently. The floor had an undisturbed layer of dust on it, and there were no marks in the carpet.

The mirror stood in one corner, and when he looked into it he could see the entire room behind him: the wooden frame, the door, the drawn curtains that kept the sun out.

And the man.

He could see the man, too.

Broad shoulders, just one arm, a shock of white in his hair. Standing in the middle of the room, watching.

When their eyes met, a flicker of surprise crossed his face, and then he disappeared.

“Hey!” Keith said, whipping around, knife in his hand. But the room was empty.

Keith let out a deep breath. He looked back at the mirror, just in case, and saw that his hands were shaking in the reflection.

He was seeing things. That was the punishment for not sleeping properly. He’d started hallucinating.

Keith rubbed at his eyes, but there wasn’t much he could do. No matter where he looked, there were no signs anyone else had been in the room. Everything was untouched. The faint scuff marks on the carpet were from Keith, and even if they weren’t, he had no way of checking.

“Oh my god,” Keith muttered. “I need to sleep. I really need to sleep. Shit.”

He’d been handsome, too.

That just made it more likely it was a hallucination. Of _course_ Keith would imagine a hot ghost.

He closed the door behind him, grabbed the boxes, and sprinted back to the entrance hall. He was never going back in there again.

\---

Hunk asked them to stay for a while after they’d eaten dinner. The lights were on, and a strong scent of food lingered in the air. Keith’s gaze still kept returning to the basement door every time he got a bit distracted. The door was closed, and hadn’t so much as twitched. Keith’s heart was beating a little too quickly, though, and when he looked at the door thought back to what had happened (what couldn’t have happened—it was just a dream), his throat tightened and a shiver went up his spine.

“So, what’s this about?” Pidge asked, itching to go back to her game. She’d been the first one to leave the kitchen after every meal, so far, for a reason: she hated doing dishes, and didn’t want it cutting into her gaming time, either.

Hunk looked at them one after the other, serious, and sat down again.

“Okay, this might sound a bit weird,” he said.

Keith wondered if something more had happened. The footsteps seemed to haunt Hunk, and only Hunk, since Keith hadn’t experienced it himself yet, but other than that and a few misplaced items, there hadn’t been any large incidents. Not like the ones Keith was still trying to deny.

Maybe Hunk had seen the man, too.

After a long pause, he seemed to have gathered himself enough to continue.

“I think this house is haunted.”

They were all very quiet for a bit. None of them took their eyes off Hunk. Keith felt like the room was spinning for a moment. He hadn’t expected him to just come out and _say_ it.

Then Lance started laughing.

“Good joke, man,” he said, wiping his eyes. “Wow, you were so serious there, I almost believed you.”

“Me too,” Pidge agreed.

“No, seriously, guys! I’m not joking. This place is definitely haunted!”

“Okay, now you’re milking it a bit. The trick to a good joke is to let it go before it stops being funny.”

Hunk didn’t look discouraged. There was something desperate, there, like he needed them to believe him. There were dark circles under his eyes, and Keith didn’t think he’d slept in a while. Great that the only two people who’d experienced something that might, _might,_ be paranormal were also the only two people who couldn’t get a decent night’s sleep.

That inspired a lot of confidence.

“Fine, then,” Lance said, once he’d finished laughing and had calmed down. “What’s making you say it’s haunted?”

Hunk leaned back in his chair. “The first night we were here, I couldn’t sleep. At first, I could just hear some creaking, y’know? The kind you always hear when you’re trying to sleep in a strange house. But then I started hearing this thudding noise. And I realized, that’s not just thudding. They’re _footsteps._ Like someone was walking back and forth outside in the corridor, in front of my door.”

Pidge’s eyebrows were raised, incredulous, and Lance leaned forward over the table, hanging off of Hunk’s every word. That extreme confidence he’d had just a few seconds earlier had faded a bit.

“I started thinking about what Keith said earlier, about how he saw the curtains moving, and then about how I knew where I’d put my toothbrush, but then when I went to get it, it was gone. Like, disappeared. Didn’t find it again. And I checked everywhere. Literally.”

Why were Hunk’s things disappearing? None of Keith’s things had gone missing, or ended up in a different place than he’d put them.

Except the ribbon. And that might still have a perfectly reasonable explanation.

“And then my phone—” Hunk started, but Pidge interrupted him.

“But we found your phone again,” she said. “You just forgot where you put it.”

“I didn’t forget where I put it!” Hunk exclaimed. “I remember clearly that I put it in the kitchen. I even sent a text to my mom just before I was gonna start making lunch. And I didn’t go anywhere near the box it was in. I swear. And I heard footsteps last night, too. This house is definitely haunted.”

For a moment Lance looked like he’d been convinced. There was something unsure on his face, his eyebrows knitted, his mouth a little open. But then he snorted.

“That’s just your nerves talking,” he told him. “Keith, you know you shouldn’t say stuff like that. Hunk’s sensitive to this kind of thing. Man, you can sleep in my room if it’s scary, but this place isn’t haunted, or anything.”

Pidge, who might have been a conspiracy theorist in her spare time, was also the most scientifically minded of them all. She didn’t believe in magic, or the supernatural, and said as much.

“People are more likely to experience supernatural events if they believe in the supernatural,” was all she said, before she excused herself.

Lance left just after, patting Hunk’s back supportively when he went past him.

Hunk looked, pleadingly, at Keith.

“You believe me, don’t you?” He sounded very small, frightened.

Keith felt bad. But he hadn’t convinced himself what he’d experienced had a supernatural explanation. Didn’t _want_ to convince himself. Didn’t want Hunk to make himself more paranoid. And so what he said, instead of ‘yes,’ instead of ‘I believe you,’ was: “I don’t know, Hunk. It’s an old house.”

Hunk’s expression fell, and regret stabbed through Keith like a dull but forcefully wielded knife.

“Yeah. No, you’re right, Keith,” Hunk said, got up, and left.

Keith sighed, and then, when he realized he was the only one in the kitchen and would have to do all the dishes by himself, sighed again. Great.

\---

Keith tried not to think about it. He did. He did the dishes, sharpened his knife, called Antok again about picking up the things, took another shower. His thoughts kept going back to the crestfallen look on Hunk’s face. They kept going back to how Keith didn’t really believe the house was just old. He _wanted_ to believe that was the case, wanted to believe it was his exhaustion that was making weird things happen.

But even though he couldn’t quite manage to convince himself either way, Hunk was his friend. Keith didn’t have many of them. And if Hunk thought the house was haunted, the very least Keith could do was try to find out if it really was.

When he went to bed that night he slept deeply, without waking even once, and woke up to early morning light. He looked up at the ceiling, contemplating life for a few minutes. The bruises on his back still hurt, but he felt noticeably lighter, less weighed down, and like maybe the house wasn’t haunted, after all.

That didn’t mean he would do nothing, however.

Keith thought back to what he knew about the house. It wasn’t much. Built sometime several hundred years ago by his ancestors. They’d lived there until various family members went out into the world to make their fortunes, and eventually no one stayed there permanently, at which point it became a vacation home. The house hadn’t originally been Krolia’s, though, but her brother’s. Keith could barely remember him, except that he was big. His uncle’s wife was a little clearer in his memories. Sharp and strict, though at some point she must have been kind, he thought. Not all of what he remembered about her was bad.

But Keith hadn’t seen that part of the family in years. His uncle died when he was very young, and his aunt died around the same time as Allura’s father. Some kind of accident, though Keith couldn’t recall what it had been.

But his aunt and uncle had a son.

And that was who the house _should_ have belonged to, since Krolia originally had no interest in keeping it herself. She hadn’t got around to fixing the paperwork for it, though.

And Keith’s cousin had gone missing the year before.

Keith didn’t know anything more than that. It was almost amazing how someone he’d been so close to as a child could just disappear completely.

He groaned, and rubbed at his face. He hadn’t missed his cousin much, but when he found out he disappeared, Keith had started thinking about him a little more. And wasn’t that unfair? To only care about someone once they were gone …

Keith pushed himself up into a sitting position. Krolia was somewhere on the other side of the world, which meant if he put off calling her, she might have gone to bed. He’d ask her. About the house, and about his cousin. It wasn’t like he’d lose anything by doing it.

It took her a minute to pick up.

“Keith,” she said. She paused for a moment. “Good morning?”

“It’s morning here, yeah. Hi, mom.”

“Why are you calling me?” Krolia coughed. “That’s not how I meant it. Is something wrong? It’s only been a few days since we last spoke.”

“Nothing’s … wrong, really.” Keith hesitated. “I was just a bit curious about something.”

“Oh?”

“You know how I said Hunk thought the house was haunted? I was just wondering—”

“Whether it really is?” Keith could hear the smile in her voice.

“Yeah.”

“Hm. Well. I’ve never experienced anything personally. But towards the end, your aunt became convinced something was wrong with the house. I don’t think she ever thought it was haunted, though I’m not sure.”

“You said I didn’t like it there.”

“You didn’t. You told me you hated it and never wanted to go back. It was pretty sudden. One day you were fine, the next you weren’t. I thought maybe you had a fight with your cousin, or Allura, or your aunt.”

Keith sighed. “I can’t remember a fight. I can’t remember much at all.”

“You were only ten or so. I don’t remember much from when I was that age, either.”

Even so … maybe there was a fight. Maybe the house was haunted, and Keith had experienced something bad. Something worse than what had happened so far. But wouldn’t he remember? He’d remember if he saw a ghost, or if he fell down the stairs into the basement, or if his things went missing. Keith was sure of it.

He couldn’t help but think that there was some memory tucked away in his head that could tell him more about the situation, he just couldn’t access it.

Maybe he could have asked his cousin, if he was there.

“How’d he go missing, mom?” he asked, after an extended period of silence. He could hear chatter in the background. It sounded like his mom was at a cafe.

“Hm? Your cousin?”

“Yeah.”

“No one knows. Apparently he came back up to Galra House for a few weeks last summer, and then he just disappeared. No one found anything in the house, or anywhere outside, but he brought some people with him, and they were injured. The police thought there might have been a fight, and that he ran away after.”

“That doesn’t sound like him.”

“No,” Krolia agreed. “It doesn’t.”

“What about those people—”

“I don’t really know, Keith, the police didn’t give us a lot of details. I don’t think they know, either.”

Keith heard Kolivan speaking to his mom, though he couldn’t make out the words.

“I have to go now,” Krolia said.

“Okay. Bye.”

“Bye, sweetie.”

Keith let himself fall back down onto the bed. So much for that. He hadn’t really found out anything new. But maybe there would be some records. Some newspaper article. Wasn’t it too much of a coincidence that his cousin had gone missing in Galra House? The house that Keith was starting to think was haunted? There might be a connection.  

Lance would laugh if he heard him. The entire situation sounded like the plot of a horror movie more than real life.

It didn’t work as discouragement, though. Keith had never cared whether Lance thought he was weird or not. Half of their friendship was built on the fact that both of them thought the other was kind of ridiculous. And if it was similar to the plot of a horror movie, then it was.

Everything came from somewhere, after all. No smoke without fire.

“Where did you go, Lotor?” he asked himself. He couldn’t come up with an answer.

Eventually, he got up and went to Pidge’s room. She peeked out at him, large round glasses emphasizing the bags under her eyes. For a moment he thought maybe she’d started hearing weird sounds, too, but then he saw the video game console she clutched in one hand. No ghostly footsteps behind her insomnia.

“Did you game all night?” he asked.

“What’s it to you?” She pulled the console closer to her chest, like she was prepared to defend it with her life.

Keith was going to back off on that point.

“Nothing. I was just wondering if you could—when you’ve finished your game—do something for me.”

Pidge stared at him, like she could extract more details through his eyes.    

“Some research. About the house,” he clarified.

One of her eyebrows rose. “You, too?”

“No, I don’t think the house is haunted. Probably. I’m just a bit curious.”

“Okay,” she said slowly. She didn’t believe him. “You owe me a favor, though.”

“I’ll buy you that game you’ve been salivating over for the past six months, when it comes out.”

“Deal.”

Pidge then disappeared back into her burrow.

“You should at least eat something!” he called after her, but received no reply.

Keith didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He’d be surprised if she survived until graduation. What would her brother say?

No, wait.

Her brother was worse.

\---

Antok and Keith carried the last of the boxes out to the truck together. It was late evening, and the last of the sun’s rays barely filtered past the house and its many chimneys. The grounds were dark despite the still-bright sky. Keith wiped the sweat off his brow when he put the cardboard box down, and sighed with relief. They were done for the day. Antok ruffled his hair.

“It’s good to see you again, kiddo,” he said.

“It’s good to see you, too. I figured you’d move away from here.”

“Nah.” Antok jumped into the driver’s seat. “I did, for a while. But can’t beat Arus that easily. All my family’s here.”

He laughed.

“Don’t wanna stay for dinner?”

Antok rolled his eyes. It wasn’t the first time Keith had asked.

“Look, kid, you and your friends are great and all, but that house is a bit too creepy for me.”

“You, too, huh?” Keith sighed.

“Me, too. It’s probably just superstition, but everyone in Arus knows this place is bad news.”

That was interesting. No one had said it quite that straightforwardly.

“Why?”

“Who knows?” Antok shrugged. “All old houses are haunted.”

Antok drove off, giving him one last wave, and the truck disappeared behind the overgrown hedges. Everyone in Arus, huh, Keith thought to himself. Everyone in Arus knew. But what did they know?

Dinner passed quietly, all of them mostly too tired to say much, except for Lance who vaguely complained about being stuck inside all day once again. They’d go outside tomorrow, Keith promised, which lifted Lance’s mood immediately, and he completely forgot he’d ever complained about anything.

Keith managed to extract himself from the kitchen just after Pidge’s hasty exit, but he found himself stopped by her just outside the door.

“I found some news articles about this house. From last year.”

“Oh?”

“Didn’t say much,” she said with a shrug. “Lotor’s your cousin, right? You probably know what they say.”

Keith nodded. Most likely. Although …

“He had some people with him—”

Pidge held up a hand to stop him, but she looked somber. “They didn’t release any names, or many details, but from the first report it seems like one of them died on the way to the hospital.”

“I see.” Keith’s insides clenched. Was it selfish, to hope some ghost was responsible, rather than his cousin? Something impermeable, unpunishable. Something that might let him get his cousin back.

He wondered what had really happened that day, one year before, but doubted he would ever find out.

“I’ll keep looking,” Pidge said. She didn’t sound as reluctant as she had, earlier. A mystery was a mystery, to Pidge. She thought they were all interesting.

“Thanks.”

Pidge patted him gently on the arm, like she could sense the confused emotions inside of him, and left for her room. Keith stood, silent, in the dark corridor, the sounds of the radio and of dishes clinking together filtering out through the kitchen door. Then, after a moment, he headed upstairs as well.

The lights were off there too, and Keith didn’t bother turning them on. He pushed open the door to his room and stepped inside, closing it behind him. Then he reached out for the light switch, and froze.

He wasn’t alone.

The shadow stood right by his bed.

Keith let out all the breath in his lungs, and flicked the switch. Yellow light bathed the room. The shadow didn’t disappear.

Keith swallowed. It was the same man from the day before; the same broad shoulders, the same tuft of white in his otherwise black hair. His arm was still missing.

“You really can see me,” it—the man—said. The voice was faint, like Keith was listening to a radio with the volume turned down.

“Who are you?” Keith asked, in barely a whisper. He tightened his hand around the knife, heart thumping loudly in his chest.

The man, ghost, _whatever,_ didn’t answer his question.

“You need to leave.” His eyes were dark, an indistinguishable color, but hard.

If Keith hadn’t seen him disappear into nothing once before, he wouldn’t have believed he wasn’t made of flesh and blood. There was nothing ephemeral about him. The sharp line of his jaw, his shoulders, his entire body … he looked exactly like a real person, with the possible exception being that Keith had never seen _anyone_ who looked like that before.

“You need to leave, before something worse happens to you or your friends.”

A stab of irritation shot through Keith.

“Are you threatening me?” he demanded. “Who the hell are you?”

An unreadable expression crossed the man’s face. He stepped closer, closer, until he was just a few feet from Keith. Their height difference became very, very obvious. Keith took an involuntary step back, hitting the door and knowing there was nowhere he could go.

“Leave,” the man said again.

Keith gritted his teeth, and swung the knife at him. For a second he thought it would just go through the man, but Keith felt the blade bite into something solid. The man’s eyes widened.

And then he disappeared once again, gone like he’d never been there at all.

There was no trace of blood on the knife.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally finished with this chapter. I was going to update yesterday, but that ... didn't happen. I'm on [twitter](https://twitter.com/delethean) if you have any questions!


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The house is definitely haunted. Keith just doesn't know what to do about it yet.

Keith genuinely contemplated the ghost’s—because it was a ghost, it had to be—demand.  _ Leave,  _ he’d said. Maybe it would be best if they did. The house was old and empty, and there was no one close by. If something happened to them, they wouldn’t be able to get help. Not until it was too late. The ghost hadn’t seriously harmed them yet, but that was the thing. Yet. Footsteps and weird sounds weren’t dangerous. But Keith remembered the tight grip around his ankles just before he fell down the stairs to the basement. He’d been lucky, but if he’d landed wrong, he could have seriously broken something. Even thinking about the  _ scritch scritch scritch  _ coming from all around him in the dark made him shudder.

If it happened to one of the others, when Keith could have prevented it, he wasn’t sure he would ever be able to forgive himself. 

Except.

Except. Keith had promised his mother that he’d help her. And though Krolia had always believed in him, he was pretty sure trying to convince her to get rid of the house because it might be haunted wouldn’t be easy. 

And, well. If the ghost wanted them to leave so desperately, and also had the  _ power  _ to make them leave, wouldn’t he have done so already? With only one exception, Keith and Hunk hadn’t experienced anything beyond creepy sounds and missing belongings. 

Keith refused to be scared off by something like that. 

Lotor had disappeared after coming to Galra House. Maybe the explanation had something to do with the ghost. Whether he’d run away, or died. What happened to the people he brought. It might have all been  _ because  _ he returned to the house, and in that case, there was no way Keith could leave. 

The fact that Keith and Lotor hadn’t spoken since they were children didn’t matter. The fact that Keith had barely thought about Lotor, even after he disappeared, didn’t matter. If the answer lay in Galra House, then Keith would stay and find it.

Keith nodded to himself. He’d made his decision. He grabbed his phone and his hiking shoes, put away his knife under his pillow, and went downstairs to join the others.

He’d promised Lance they’d get out of the house that day, and though he felt obligated to stay inside and do some more tidying, it was too late to back out. Lance wanted to experience hiking a mountain trail , so they would  _ all  _ experience hiking a mountain trail. All because some influencer he looked up to had started rock climbing or whatever, he’d been hooked on the thought of going out into nature and taking selfies in front of waterfalls.

“There you are!” Lance said, waiting in the entrance hall in his shiny new hiking boots, backpack, and jacket.

Keith was betting Lance would last a few hours outside before dying from the heat. He wasn’t going to mention that quite yet, though.

The hiking trail Lance had picked out was the same one the lady in the general store mentioned. Apparently following a local’s tip was also part of the experience. Keith didn’t point out that the trail in question was marked out in bright red on the map they’d bought in that same general store. Pidge covered up her snort with a loud cough.

Keith couldn’t deny that being outside felt nice, though. It wasn’t as hot as it had been the previous days, but the sun shone brightly in a sky dotted with puffy white clouds, and a fresh breeze streamed in through the open windows of the car. He glanced back at the house as they drove away, but the overgrown hedges had already covered up his view, and he saw nothing except chimneys stick up above the leaves. 

Haunted. In the daylight, it seemed impossible. But Keith was (mostly) past denying it.

Surprisingly, despite Lance driving, they found the hiking trail with no problems. There was a small car park just where the trail started, and Lance jumped out of the car triumphantly around a second after parking. He spun around, eyes wide, like he was trying to take in everything around them. 

It  _ was  _ beautiful. Keith could see the road they’d taken there snake through the landscape, and from where he stood the entire valley they were in was on full display. Bright green fields and forests covered the land, houses dotted around sporadically, like little specks of color. The start of the trail was a dirt path that cut through a forest filled with tall, thick trees that covered the side of the mountain. If he tilted his head back, he could just barely glimpse the snow capped peaks high above.

They weren’t completely alone, though. There was another car parked by the start of the trail, although there were no people there. Someone else out hiking, maybe.

“Can you believe this, Keith?” Lance shouted. He’d positioned himself just below the sign that indicated the trail to take a selfie. Or ten. 

“Yup. I can.” Keith really did wonder how long Lance was gonna stand there until he took a picture he liked.

Eventually, once they’d packed out all their stuff from the car and Lance still wasn’t done, Keith grabbed him by the collar and started hauling him up the trail.

“Keith, you’re choking me!”

“Then start walking.”

Lance grumbled for a bit after that. Keith paid him no mind. 

The trail went uphill through the forest, at first at a gentle incline, and then becoming steeper the further away from the road they came. Unlike the forest around Galra House, which was mostly filled with evergreens, this one was a mix of evergreens and tall, silver-stemmed birches and other trees that Keith didn’t know the names of. Growing up in a desert hadn’t left him with the broadest knowledge of trees or the birds you’d find in them. He could hear birdsong from all around him, but he couldn’t identify them.

Krolia, who’d spent all of her summers in Arus, probably could. Keith made a mental note to ask her a few questions when she came up there. 

“Look!” Hunk whispered, bumping into his shoulder with barely contained excitement. 

He pointed into the underbrush, and Keith followed his gaze. At first he didn’t see anything, but then one of the bushes rustled, and a big, fuzzy rabbit hopped out. Keith could  _ feel  _ Hunk making heart-eyes at it. 

The rabbit jumped around for a bit, looking for food, but then a twig snapped and it darted away.

“Pidge!” Hunk said. “You scared him away.”

“Sorry.” Pidge didn’t sound very apologetic. 

She’d never been a big fan of nature, and was currently generously spraying herself with some kind of bug repellent. The sharp stench of it filled the air.

“Y’know that’s probably terrible for the environment, right?” Hunk said.

“The environment is encroaching on my personal space. If it stops, I will stop, too.”

“Pretty sure we’re the ones encroaching on the environment,” Keith said. 

“I’m not the one who dragged myself out on a hike.” Pidge tucked away the spray. “I was  _ this  _ close to figuring out how to beat that boss, too.”

“We didn’t come here to play games!” Lance said from where he stood at the top of the hill they were climbing.

He spread his arms out wide. “We came here to enjoy NATURE!”

A flock of birds fled from where they’d been hiding in the trees, and all the ambient sounds of life fell completely silent. 

“Good job, man,” Hunk told him.

“Pretty sure we came here to help Keith’s mom out,” Pidge said, calmly pulling out her phone to start up one of her games. Hunk plucked it out of her hands. Last time she’d been on her phone while walking she’d crashed into a lamp post. 

“If you scare nature away, you won’t be able to enjoy it,” Keith said, patting his shoulder when he caught up to him.

“Oh, shut up, Keith.” Lance had lowered his volume significantly.

They kept going, climbing up the wide path until they were out of breath and sweat ran down their faces. Lance had tied his jacket around his waist at some point, pointedly ignoring Keith and Pidge when he passed her some money. Damn. He’d thought Lance would hold out a little longer. 

For the first hour or two, all Keith could see was the forest that surrounded them on all sides. The trees were too tall, so even as they ascended it wasn’t possible to see the valley that lay below them. But then the trail let out into a wide, open clearing, and when he turned around just where the path rejoined the forest on the other side, the view was clear and he could see every hill and mountain in the area.

“Can we … please … stop for a while,” Lance gasped. “I think I’m dying.”

“You’re just in bad shape,” Pidge said. She was panting, too, and looked like she was dying just as much as Lance.

“I’m the one who ran that marathon just a month ago.”

“Oh, the one that’s barely two miles?”

“No, okay, that’s enough,” Hunk said, stepping between them to stop the bickering from devolving into an argument. “Let’s eat lunch here.”

The mention of food distracted both of them. Keith spread out the blanket they’d brought with them on the ground, and Hunk pulled out a thermos of coffee, and several boxes of food that, when opened, smelled so good Keith felt faint. They ate and talked in the shadow under the tree where they’d settled, and soon enough Keith was full and happy. He lay down on his back and looked up at the clouds that slowly drifted across the deep blue sky. Drowsiness began to spread through his limbs, and filled his head with something thick and fluffy. 

From somewhere to his side, Keith could hear Lance snoring, and the soft sounds from Pidge’s phone, which she’d managed to steal back from Hunk. 

“Don’t fall asleep,” Hunk muttered admonishingly to them, but was losing the battle himself. “Might be … axe murderers or something lurking around.”

Pidge snorted. “First the house is haunted and now there are horror movie bad guys in the forest. Hunk, you need to stop reading those creepy pastas at night.”

“But when I’ve started I need to know how it ends!”

“Don’t start, then,” Keith said, trying to keep his eyes open, but it seemed like his eyelids were glued together.

Since the house  _ was  _ haunted, there could be axe murderers hiding in the bushes somewhere. Keith had gone from trying to dismiss everything, to not being capable of dismissing anything. 

“What was that?” Hunk asked suddenly.

Keith could see him sit up from the corner of his eye.

“What?” 

“That sound. Shh.”

Keith couldn’t hear anything. Just some birds, the wind through the grass and the leaves of the trees, faint rustling from the forest just behind them, Lance’s snores. He was about to tell Hunk that when he heard something: a rhythmic thumping sound.  _ Thump  _ pause  _ thump  _ pause at regular intervals. 

He opened his eyes properly, but didn’t move. Hunk had gone very still, and all the blood had drained from his face.  

It sounded like—Keith wasn’t sure, but somehow it was almost familiar in some way, like he’d heard something similar before. He frowned and listened, trying to filter out all other noise. The thumping sound was coming closer and closer. From the path?

He tilted his head so he could look. There was nothing there as far as he could see, but the trees blocked his view. 

Keith slowly pushed himself up into a sitting position, and spotted something brown moving in the forest. And then— 

Right.

It was a person with a walking stick. The stick made a thumping sound each time it hit the ground, but the man’s other foot barely made a sound at all. He had coarse gray hair and a long beard, and he lifted his hat and nodded when he saw them.

“Good day,” he said, coming to a stop. 

Keith, Hunk and Pidge echoed the greeting.

“Not usual to find young folks like you up here this early.” The man smiled, but most of it was hidden by his mustache. 

“You often hike up here?” Hunk asked, the first to remember his manners. Color had returned to his face, though his eyes were twitching around a bit.

“Every weekend, yeah,” the man said. “I try to, anyway. It’s a bit far from my house, but the view’s beautiful up top. You kids here on vacation?”

“Yeah, well, kinda. We’re taking a little break from work.”

“Summer job, then?”

“Helping our friend Keith’s mom out with clearing out her house.”

The man’s bushy eyebrows rose. “House? Around here? You don’t mean Galra House? I heard someone say they were gonna do something with it, recently.”

“Galra House,” Keith confirmed. The man’s eyes turned to him.

“You’re Keith, then? Related to the Galra family?”

“On my mom’s side.”

“Yeah. I can see the family resemblance.” The man’s gaze was appraising. “How’s the old house doing? Haven’t been down that way in a while. Can’t be in good condition, been empty for years.”

“Filled with stuff, but otherwise it’s fine,” Pidge said. “Hasn’t rained yet, though, so I guess it might be leaky or something.”

“Old houses usually are.” The man chuckled. His expression turned serious, then. “You should be careful.”

“Careful? Why?” Pidge asked, frowning.

“Well, like I said, it’s an old house. Far away, too. If something happened to you, it might not be easy to get help.”

Keith sat up further. That thought had crossed his mind, too, but hearing someone else say it sent a shiver through him. 

“Something? Why’d something happen?” Pidge just seemed curious, like she always was. Hunk had gone pale again.

“Oh, you know,” the man said. “There are a lot of rumors about it in the area. Weird sounds. Things disappearing. People disappearing. Just last year, a young lad around your age got himself disappeared. Police couldn’t find ‘im. You must know all about that, right?”

The man’s eyes turned to Keith again, glinting in the sun. He heard Hunk squeak faintly.

“Yeah.” Keith’s lungs felt like they had no air.

Pidge glanced at him briefly, eyes narrowed.

“And that other kid, too. Didn’t he die? Cops wouldn’t say much. If you ask me, I don’t think they had any idea what happened to ‘em. Useless.”

The man let out a short bark of a laugh.

“You’re probably sick of hearing superstition from an old man, and it’s about time I head back home. Just be careful in that house. Would be a shame if something similar happened this year, too.”

He waved at them over his shoulder, and set off down the trail. The regular thumping noise faded away slowly, though they heard it long after the man’s back disappeared from view.

“That was … something,” Pidge said eventually. She pushed her glasses back up her nose.

Hunk let out another squeak. “Someone  _ died  _  in that house?” he asked, turning to Keith and grabbing him by the shoulders. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Not  _ in  _ the house, I think it was on the way to the hospital.”

“And who’s the person who disappeared? Why do other people know about weird noises and things disappearing? Keith, the house really is haunted! Why didn’t you tell me?”

Hunk shook him as the questions streamed out of his mouth, and Keith started to feel a bit dizzy.

Keith sighed, reached up and plucked Hunk’s hands off his shoulders. 

“Calm down, and I’ll tell you what I know.” 

Keith, with Pidge’s help, told Hunk what had happened the year before, with as many details as they knew, which wasn’t much. He didn’t mention the ghost he’d seen, though. If he did, Hunk would never go back into the house.

“Anyway, that’s why my mom took over the place. Technically speaking it was hers the entire time, but there was something about inheritance laws or something. I don’t know. But there was a lot of paperwork.”

“Shit, man. I’m sorry about your cousin.” Hunk pulled him into a tight hug, like he always did when he wanted to comfort someone. 

“I still don’t buy that the house is haunted,” Pidge said. 

“Oh, it’s definitely haunted,” Hunk said, letting Keith go.

“So, you wanna leave?” Keith asked. “Wouldn’t blame you.”

Hunk shook his head. “Oh, no, no, no, no. Dude, I  _ promised  _ your mom I was gonna help you guys out. I never break my promises. And I  _ love  _ your mom. She’s my favorite person after my family and you three. And also she’s really scary.”

Keith couldn’t help laughing at that. All of his friends had had a terrifying first impression of Krolia. He hadn’t been there to see it, and no one had told him what, exactly, happened, but from how they reacted whenever he mentioned her, it must have been pretty dramatic. 

The tension in Keith’s shoulders eased a bit after that, though it lingered for the rest of their time on the trail. Once Lance, who’d been completely unconscious during their conversation with the old man, woke up, they continued their hike up the path until they got to a viewing platform that let them admire the view. At that point it was late afternoon, and though it was possible to keep going, they decided unanimously to call it quits for the day. After all, they needed to have some energy left for the next day. 

Lance’s excitement for the outdoors had waned by that time, too. They were all tired and sweaty, but Lance seemed to be especially so, like it went beyond just physical exhaustion. He’d taken hundreds of selfies on the way up, but as they retraced their steps, he didn’t lift his phone once.

“Why is nature so much hard work?” he asked at the halfway point.

No one bothered answering. Once they reached the car, and Keith was volunteered for driving duty, his spirits picked up a bit.

“I’m gonna get so many likes,” he muttered to himself, scrolling through his phone in the backseat.

“Is that all you got out of today?” Hunk asked. 

“Not  _ all,  _ Hunk, my man,” Lance assured him. “But I have to take care of my social media accounts. I get both enjoyment and popularity from the things I do.”

“Just don’t turn into an influencer on us,” Keith said. “Although, if you do, I guess there won’t be anyone to challenge me for that NASA internship.”

He saw Lance’s eyes bug out in the mirror.

“You’re getting that internship over my dead body, Keith. I’m gonna be both an influencer  _ and  _ NASA’s next top star.”

“This isn’t America’s Got Talent we’re talking about, here,” Pidge said, sighing. “And anyway, we all know  _ I’m  _ the one who’s getting the internship.”

By the time they got back to the house, Pidge and Lance weren’t speaking to each other, and Hunk looked about ready to pass out from exhaustion. Keith herded them into the house, feeling like a shepherd or maybe a sheep dog, pushed Hunk down on the couch in the kitchen, and got everyone something to drink. Pidge and Lance studiously ignored one another, and the starting twinges of a headache presented themselves just behind Keith’s eyes. 

Why had he thought it was a good idea to take them to Galra House, again? He couldn’t for the life of him remember. 

“Sorry, guys,” Hunk said, still collapsed on the couch. “You’re gonna have to be a bit patient. I’ll make dinner once my legs stop feeling like jelly.”

“Is this about what that guy said, or are you just really tired?” Pidge asked, handing him another glass of water.

“Both. Probably both.”

“What guy?” Lance asked, munching on a chocolate bar he’d found somewhere.

Keith hoped it was one they’d brought with them, and not one that had already been in the house.

“Oh, right, you weren’t awake for that,” Pidge said, and launched into telling the story.

Lance’s eyes were wide at the end, but after a while, he started laughing.

“That’s so creepy. What, are we in a horror movie? This is so cliché. Spooky house, cryptic warnings, missing cousins. Though that last bit isn’t funny, sorry, Keith.”

“It’s fine. I get it.” It did feel more like the plot of a horror movie than real life.

“It  _ was  _ really creepy, though,” Hunk said, and shuddered. “Nah, I’m gonna go and take a nap in my room. This couch feels like it’s made of stone.”

The rest of them eventually dispersed, too, and Keith slowly headed up the stairs. He was tired, and he’d definitely feel it in his legs in the morning. College had made him sedentary. He groaned and stretched, both muscles and bruises aching.

He really wanted to take a nap, too, but knew if he fell asleep he probably wouldn’t get back up again. 

Keith pushed his door open, rubbing at his eyes. He stopped, and let his hand fall away, then he rubbed at his eyes again. 

His room was a  _ mess.  _

Ned sheets and pillows and all of his clothes covered the floor. His bags were all open and empty, turned inside out. The drawers in the dresser were haphazardly pulled out, their contents spilling on the floor, and the door to the closet stood wide open. It was like someone had ransacked the room. Like they’d been looking for something, and had turned it all upside down to find it.

Keith swore. The ghost had told him to get out, but he hadn’t imagined he’d do something like  _ this.  _ Rather than fear, which he’d expected, a pulse of irritation went through him, before he sighed in defeat. 

Honestly, he hoped the ghost was responsible. It’d be worse if a human had broken in and stolen something. Not that he had anything worth stealing, just his phone and his wallet, and he’d brought those with him on the hike.

Keith started picking up his clothes, discovering, when he held them all together, that maybe his wardrobe was a little monotone. Black, black, black, something red, black, black—

No wonder Lance was always complaining about the way he dressed. Keith snorted. Let him complain. He wasn’t gonna buy new stuff just because his style offended Lance.

Nothing seemed to be missing, though, Keith concluded once he’d cleared the mess away. His clothes, the books he’d taken with him in case he felt like reading, his other pair of shoes, all his toiletries, it was all there. Then he stopped in his tracks. No. Wait.

He counted through his things once more. Then he emptied out the backpack he’d taken on the hike. Water bottle. Map. Felt through his pockets, panic rising in waves through his entire body.

“Shit, shit, shit.”

His knife.

His knife was gone.

\---

Keith wandered back downstairs to help with dinner, still numb. He didn’t—couldn’t—accept that he’d lost the knife. He hadn’t brought it with him on the hike, scared he’d somehow drop it, but regretted that bitterly now. There was no part of his bedroom he hadn’t searched, hadn’t torn apart and turned upside down, to find the knife. But it was nowhere. There wasn’t even a trace of it. And he knew where it should have been. He hadn’t misplaced it.

This was the same thing that had happened to Hunk’s phone, except his knife hadn’t turned back up yet. 

It still might. Keith hadn’t hoped this much for anything in a long time.  

Hunk was already in the kitchen, and for one overpowering split second, Keith wanted nothing more than to pull him aside and apologize for how he’d behaved about his phone and his toothbrush and everything else. The impulse faded, not from lack of shame, but from the fear that he would make everything worse. If Keith told him that there was, almost certainly, a ghost of unknown malevolence in the house, maybe the ghost would go after Hunk, too.

Still, there was a certain level of disbelief in the back of Keith’s mind (ghosts didn’t exist, couldn’t exist, what he’d seen was the product of paranoia and hallucination), and a kind of embarrassment he hadn’t experienced in a long time. The fear of being dismissed or rejected for what he said. It was a stupid, ridiculous feeling, and Keith tried to push it down.  _ Keith  _ was the one who’d rejected Hunk’s genuine concerns. Hunk had a much kinder heart than he did, would probably go out of his way to excuse Keith’s actions before he had a chance to do it himself. 

“Hey, Keith,” Hunk said when he spotted him lurking by the door, tired smile on his face. “I was getting a bit antsy, being down here all by myself.”

“Why?” Keith asked, coming in and sitting down. Concern quickly replaced his self-pity.

“Guys!” Lance yelled, skidding into the room. “I’m dying!”

Keith had jumped up from the chair, and Hunk had whipped around, eyes wide, kitchen knife in his hand, unwilling but ready to strike whatever monster had attacked Lance.

“My stomach!” Lance moaned, dragged himself over to one of the chairs and collapsed. “I think I’m dying. It feels—like it’s eating itself? I can’t remember ever feeling this bad before!”

“So … you’re hungry? Is that it?” Keith asked, annoyed and relieved at the same time.

“Yes, thank you for understanding, though I don’t like your dismissive tone.”

Hunk put down the knife with a clatter, clutching at his heart.

“I thought you were really dying, Lance, not cool, man.”

“No, seriously, I’m starving.”

“Not sure I can keep making dinner after almost suffering a heart attack, sorry.”

Lance looked stricken. 

“We’ll help you,” Keith said, volunteering them both.

“Thanks, Keith.” Hunk pointed at some vegetables on the bench. “Mind chopping those up? Small pieces. And Lance, you’re measuring this stuff.”

“I hate measuring stuff,” Lance grumbled, though he got up from his chair.

“What were you saying earlier?” Keith asked, once he’d cut up most of the carrots. 

“Oh, yeah. Lance distracted me.” Hunk glanced at the door to the basement. “I’ve been hearing this sound, like scratching, maybe? Coming from down there.”

“Rats?” Lance asked. “I don’t like rats. If there are rats, I’m leaving.”

“Can you hear it? It’s not super noticeable, but when I was alone …” Hunk shuddered. “I’d go look, but that’s how you get killed in movies. Plus it’s dark. And a basement.”

“Lance and I can check it out.”

“Keith!” Lance had a betrayed expression on his face. 

“I thought you said you hated measuring stuff.” Then an idea struck him. “And I thought you didn’t think the house was haunted. You’re not scared, are you?”

“I don’t,” Lance said quickly. “And I’m not.”

“Then what’s the problem?” Keith asked, knowing he’d won, and suppressing the heavy feeling in his stomach.

“It’s not. There’s no problem. Let’s go.” Lance grabbed Keith’s arm and hauled him to the basement door. He hesitated at opening it for just a moment, but then shook himself, and pushed it open.

Nothing motivated Lance more than Keith suggesting he couldn’t do something.

There was no light in the staircase now, either, but the light in the kitchen made it less dark than it had been the other night, and let Keith see the light switch on the wall. He flicked the switch, and an old light bulb that hung from the ceiling flickered to life, dim but serviceable. The wooden steps creaked and groaned when Keith started descending, Lance’s hand holding his arm in a vice grip. 

The staircase wasn’t as long as it had felt when Keith fell down it, but then, his perceptions were understandably affected by the experience. He still felt a chill spread through his body, raising goosebumps along his skin. At first he thought it was because he was thinking about his last time down in the basement.

“It’s cold down here,” Lance said then, and struck that thought from Keith’s mind.

It really was cold, and not just his imagination. 

The basement was a long, fairly narrow room with a low ceiling. A few old crates were shoved haphazardly up against the walls, and on one side there were shelves meant for storing wine, still holding a couple of dusty bottles. Even with the light turned on, the shadows were deep and couldn’t be chased out of the corners. A thick layer of dust and dirt covered the floor, though Keith could see the marks from where he’d landed just beneath the stairs. 

But there were other marks in the dust, too, surrounding his own outline just a few feet away. Thin claw marks. 

He couldn’t hear anything now, but the  _ scritch scritch scritch  _ echoed in his ears.

Keith brushed away some of the dust.

“Ew, man, what if there’s rat poop on the floor?” 

He didn’t bother answering that. The marks were etched into the floor, too. All over the place. Little scratches in the stone. He swept away more dust, and found that the further away from the center of the room he got, the fewer scratch marks there were. Like their path led straight through the room, from the staircase—he raised his gaze—to the other end.

A large door sat in the middle of the far wall, swathed in shadow. 

“Okay, Keith, we’ve confirmed there are rats here, let’s go, please.” Lance’s voice was loud and shrill.

“Just a sec,” he answered, getting up to his feet. There was something pale on the door handle.

“Keith!”

The ceiling got slightly lower as he walked towards the other end of the room, but he could still stand upright. There was less dust, too, and Keith could see marks on the floor, perpendicular to the door. Small scratch marks, too, but mostly broader grooves, several grouped together and then bigger spaces in between. Like something had been dragged or pushed through the door many times. Like—

Scratch marks. But not from claws. From nails.

Keith looked up at the door, and saw similar scratches covering the wooden frame.

“What the fuck,” Lance said, much closer than Keith had realized. “No, what the  _ actual  _ fuck?”

Then Lance turned tail and bolted out of the basement. Keith heard him thundering up the stairs without needing to turn around. He couldn’t turn around. Looking up from the marks, his eyes had caught on the handle and there it was.

Allura’s missing ribbon. 

Wrapped around the metal bit and tied roughly, the torn edge fluttering in the faint draft that came from under the door. His heart clenched sharply. 

Keith raised his hand and put it on the handle.

“Don’t.” 

That voice again. Keith whipped around, and sure enough. The ghost stood right there, ten feet away, eyebrows knitted and eyes dark. Like he was angry.

“What’s behind the door?” Keith asked.

“Don’t go in,” the ghost said. Ordered. His voice was deep and clipped. 

“What’s behind it?” Keith asked again, impatient and angry because  _ what the fuck.  _ “Did you put the ribbon here? Why did you take my knife? What the fuck are you trying to do?”

He wasn’t yelling yet, but he wasn’t far from it.

The ghost moved closer, looming over Keith. “I’m not trying to do anything. If you care about your friends, you get out of this house, right now.”

“You can’t tell me what to do,” Keith said through gritted teeth.

The angry expression on the ghost’s face deepened, and then faded.

“On your head be the consequences, then.”

The ghost turned around and disappeared. 

Keith was still seeing red and, defiant, he tried to open the door. It didn’t budge, though, not even when he pushed against it with all his might. Locked, or barred from the other side. He looked again at the nail marks on the floor, when he heard it. 

_ Scritch scritch scritch.  _

The light bulb flickered. 

_ Scritch scritch scritch.  _

His heart, which had been racing when he talked to the ghost, stopped completely.

He untied the ribbon, tucked it into his pocket, and ran for the stairs.

His heart didn’t start again until he collapsed on a chair in the kitchen, the door to the basement firmly closed behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I got a bit excited and somehow wrote this chapter in two days. Can you believe this fic is at 20k already, and Keith still doesn't know Shiro's name? I'm on [twitter](https://twitter.com/delethean) if you have any questions!


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